Reflektor, Year Zero, and a Brief History of the Elaborate Album Rollout

Scrawled or spray-painted across buildings around the world, the now-recognizable Reflektor hieroglyph has become a useful logo for the Arcade Fire’s fourth album, due out next week. A large diamond gridded into nine smaller diamonds, it is based on Haitian veve drawings that are typically intended to summon spirits, yet its current use is much more earthly: It is a DIY ad, an emblem not only of the album but of the Arcade Fire’s unusual promotional cycle, which so far has been ambitious, vague, confounding, a little heavy-handed, and very successful.

This has been a pivotal year for determining how major pop acts release and market albums. In addition to Reflektor, high-profile rollouts by Daft Punk and Kanye West have proved extremely elaborate, carefully planned, and incredibly effective in turning event albums into events. Daft Punk debuted a clip from Random Access Memories at Coachella back in April, upstaging every in-the-flesh act at the festival. In May, they held a listening party in Wee Waa, a small town in the middle of the middle of nowhere Australia. Not to be outdone, West projected the video for "New Slaves" on 66 buildings around the world. Nodding to the work of video installation artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, the strategy reinforced West’s role as not simply a rapper or producer, but a high-culture artmaker.

These intricate rollouts created a kind of public art, wherein the actual music becomes only one aspect of the larger experience. As such, it immediately pales as it passes from present to past tense. That fleeting quality, however, does not erase the precedents; in fact, each draws on the successes and failures of previous campaigns by similar and not-so-similar artists. The 2000s have proved a laboratory for promotions, with increases in technology offering new ways to market music while decreases in sales have created a new desperation to create blockbusters. As a result, new ideas and practices have emerged over the years, each attempting to take advantage of the latest developments in social media.

Perhaps the easiest ploy—or at least one of the most common—is the online scavenger hunt. In 2006, AFI launched its album decemberunderground with a multimedia hunt that involved numerous web sites, telephone numbers, classified ads, even a comic book store. It was a bit of a jumble, but succeeded in becoming a news story in and of itself. In 2011 and 2012, respectively, Smashing Pumpkins and Yeasayer both launched similar hunts, albeit on a much smaller scale. Billy Corgan hid links to unreleased old outtakes and rarities via secret links on the Smashing Pumpkins web site, which helped generate buzz for Oceania, their first studio album in five years.

Even as it sends participants on wild goose chases, these tactics seemingly remove another barrier between artist and fan. Sometimes, though, that isn't such a good thing. Ashanti’s 2008 single "The Way That I Love You", may be the biggest promotional faceplant in pop music—it’s the kind of story that makes PR reps lose sleep. The R&B singer filmed a grisly video for the single, in which she brutally murders a cheating boyfriend. At the end, viewers were able to send their friends personalized death threats featuring imagery from the video. As Lola Ogunnaike wrote on CNN.com: "The next victim, it suggested, would be me. On the wall of one of the crime scenes were the words 'Lola Will Die', written in what appeared to be blood." Needless to say, the campaign was quickly discontinued.

The most elaborate album rollout in recent memory, though, is still probably the one for Nine Inch Nails' 2007 release Year Zero, a concept album about the first contact between humans and aliens. As though rewriting every single mythology episode of The X-Files, the campaign involved an "alternate reality video game" played out via concert t-shirts, web sites, 1-800 numbers, murals, mp3s, videos, and other outlets. The scope itself is impressive, even a bit intimidating to all but the most devoted NIN fan, but Reznor’s most ingenious stroke was to leak songs himself. He left jump drives taped to seats and bathroom stalls around the world, then waited for curious fans to track them down. In some ways, West, Daft Punk and the Arcade Fire are all tipping their hats to Reznor: Like Year Zero, what's been most distinct about these 2013 campaigns is the way they've emphasized the real world over the nebulousness of the internet—trusting social media simply to chronicle the actual events and instigate the buzz. Whether you thought it was a brilliant tactic or a convoluted gimmick, Reznor's Year Zero rollout now feels like a prescient means of inciting post-digital mystery: Even years later, I still find myself wondering if there are jump drives out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.